Cluster of baby hats

After just a week of frantic crochet I now have 4 pretty little hats for the Save the Children "Knit one save one" appeal. With a little trial and error I did manage to design my own version of the new born hat pattern that was published in Woman's Weekly. In fact - I had so much fun designing the first hat that I also designed a similar second hat (you can find these patterns in the sidebar on the right).

The two patterns for these hats (shown in the photo as the first 3 hats - blue, lilac & pink) should hopefully be error free and are much, much easier to make up than the pattern that I spent a week struggling with. These little hats are now destined to be sent off to my Mum for packaging up with any hats that she and my sister make up. Hopefully they help warm some little newborn heads soon.

Save the Children hat

My mum sent me a pattern from her copy of Woman's Weekly so I could join in with the latest Save the Children campaign which is trying to get knitters and crocheters all making up hats for newborns.

I've had a number of problems in working up this pattern though - to the point where I almost tore it apart in frustration. The pattern is worked from the bottom up as one flat piece and then joined together at the end. The instructions for this are very confusing and the pattern's main stitch is working crossed dc's which I had not encountered before.

I'm very tempted to have a go at writing a similar pattern that would be quicker to work up and much easier to understand... for starters I would certainly want to be working this in a round with no joining together at the end. I may even publish it on Crochet Me so that anyone else who wants to join in this appeal can have a nice simple pattern to work with.

For a quick laugh I've included a photo of my first attempt making this pattern up - looks pretty bad right?

Jayne Cobb hat

Some of you may already know who Jayne Cobb is - but for those of you who don't he was one of the characters in the fantastic series "Firefly" and during that series he received a hat similar to the one I have just finished making.

Over at the Crochet Me website Kim Werker has put out a call asking all crocheters to have a go at making up one of these hats and posting a photo of themselves in it in the hopes of enticing Joss Wheldon (creator of Firefly, Buffy & Angel) to do an interview with her.

Well my attempt isn't quite right, it has 2 extra colours in it for starters (I didn't have enough of one yellow for the top so to even that out I had to use an extra darker red at the bottom) and instead of using a chunky yarn I ended up with a much finer double knitting yarn... so I had to do my own pattern. I still like this hat though - and hopefully my sister will too as it is one of the first of the Christmas presents I've made... only about 50 more to do *sigh*.

Pretty purple

I'm already starting to make use of some of the stash that I've just received from that lovely freecycler I mentioned in my last post. This weekend was spent playing with some of the purple wool and it feels great to be using something other than green!

First off I wanted to make a simple card up to say thank you for all the wool and using the pattern for a small chrysanthemum from my Crochet inspiration book to make up the main motif it only took another 10 minutes before I had a pretty card to send.

Next I decided to do another bit of Birthday crafting and make up one of my simple purses, but this time in purple. With a matching zip and little felt star (and a few sequins for a bit of sparkle) the purse looks so sweet and is just the right size for getting a few credit cards, coins and notes in.

More Birthday crafting will probably follow shortly... I also have high hopes of doing some early Christmas crafting very soon to try and get a good few presents made up before I go into baby panic.

Christmas has come early

Have you heard of the fantastic emailing list called Freecycle? If not then you are probably really missing out. The idea is that you subscribe to the list and offer anything that you don't want/can't sell/have cluttering up you home to the list. Anyone who is interested can then send you a quick message and ask to have it. This way unwanted items stay out of landfill and a large group of people get to share what they no longer need.

My husband and I have freecycled a lot of our unwanted stuff (mostly after house moves) and it was great to know that these items would go on to other homes who wanted and would use them. But today it was my turn to take what someone else was throwing out and give it a good home. I hit the big time with this huge stash of beautiful wool. Just look at it... that rainbow of left over skeins of wool (so many exciting new colours!) and then those two massive piles of bright red and lovely purple wool. I think I shall be smiling about this for such a long time!

Frog in my throat

Yup - I've been feeling poorly, poorly enough to take a day off work and rest up at home. Sitting back my fingers itched to make something cute to cheer me up - and what better to make when you have a sore throat - a frog of course!

I've been wanting to make up the excellent pattern of a tree frog from the Roman Sock blog (this site has some beautiful free patterns and is well worth a good long visit) for about a year now and I've only been holding off as I couldn't find red cats eyes anywhere. Finally I bit the bullet and made do with some green eyes that I already had in my stash, and I'm so glad that I did. Because of using green eyes I decided to stick with green feet too as I thought it would be better to do a good old fashioned frog rather than a half attempt at a tree frog.

I've just officially fallen in love with this guy - I had great fun taking his photo earlier and I'm really going to find it very hard to give this one away. Sadly he is intended for a friend's Birthday, but I doubt it will be long before I make one up for myself.

Fruity purse

Another summer birthday is on its way so I needed a very quick project that I could whip up in a few hours, luckily I had something started already.

You may remember that back in January I was trying my hand at designing my own crochet items for sale. One of the items that I thought might sell well were little crochet purses - and they were very quick and easy to crochet up. However, when it came to finishing them off and trying to hand sew in a zip things got a little harder.

This little purse is the same one photographed back in January, but this time with the zip finally put in and a leaf added at the top in the hopes that it looks something like an apple. I've also not bothered trying to line this purse as the crochet is very dense and sturdy so should be fine without.

I may make more of these, I just wish I had a bit of orange wool so that I could do some oranges as well as apples - hey, maybe I could try a few different fruits too...